Michael, if you truly felt sorry for the distress that you caused Ripps you'd removed the tweet slamming his work, as well as this post vaunting your superior ethical sense.

Besides picking and choosing which social media criticisms to validate, another example of your selective ethics is the choice of Andrea Fraser as a counterpoint to Ripps. That's actually pretty rich, since she also made an artwork about sex in a hotel. Let's let Wikipedia describe it:"In her videotape performance Untitled (2003), Fraser recorded a hotel-room sexual encounter with a private collector, who had paid close to $20,000 to participate, 'not for sex, according to the artist, but to make an artwork.' Actually, according to Andrea Fraser, the amount that the collector had paid her has not been disclosed, and the '$20,000' figure is way off the mark. Only 5 copies of the 60-minute DVD were produced, 3 of which are in private collections, 1 being that of the collector with whom she had had the sexual encounter; he had pre-purchased the performance piece in which he was a particularly important participant."

Here's an artist who actually did have sex in a hotel -- nothing nearly as innocent as watching while someone made drawings -- and filmed it, in a piece that narcissistically dealt with her position as a much-feted artist and her "relations" with wealthy collectors in the faintly ridiculous upper strata of the art world. You've airbrushed out her past to present the new, earnest white liberal Fraser, flying from her LA art professor job to pantomime the little people of New Orleans, in their own best interests, of course.

The online magazine Dazed did a better job describing Ripps' artwork than you did -- their treatment is skeptical, but balanced, accurate, and lighter in tone. For all its appearance of balanced "compare and contrast," yours is a hatchet job, reducing art to "correct" politics.

I would take Ripps at his word that the discussion of "Art Whore" was friends-only, and therefore social media "reaction," to the extent it escaped those bounds, is not "part of the art." Evidently some of his "friends" (who weren't really friends) pulled it into a private context and thereby declared their part of it off-limits to discussion. If Ripps deleted his posts by the time you were ready to write about it, and the dissent was never available, this says to me it's not a proper subject for the Ripps vs Fraser analysis you make here (where Fraser is clearly favored).

I didn't say that "every viewpoint, however unpopular, must be expressed in full public view." As you say, the parameters of your "archiving" haven't been defined yet. Some form of "monitoring" social media channels (as in auditing, listening to, finding some way to parse) is badly needed, if that's the new place for discourse. We've talked about this -- now you're putting an Orwellian spin on my words.

Heather alludes to "debates" from those channels that touched off your tweet and this post. You should at least summarize the high points. You don't have to say who said what.

Facebook itself is not public! Ripps has said his discussion was "friends only."

Art F City applied a double standard by liberally screenshotting from Ripps' discussion, and yet scrupulously refusing to copy the complaints against his project from a "private, women-only Facebook group."

You made your own assessment, in writing this post, based on what you could read of Ryder's comments (that I did not have access to) but not his accusers'.

This is a perfect example of why some kind of etiquette needs to be worked out in copying, referring to, or, yes "monitoring" social media art discussions.